Executables in bin folder conflict with their gem versions.

It would be nice if the executables for rdoc, rake, ri, etc. locate in bin folder, would be standard RubyGems stubs. Otherwise, once there is installed version of such library as a gem, the original file is rewritten and the functionality of bundled library is lost.

But my main concern is the conflict between ruby and gem executables, since it makes packaging for Linux distributions hard (for Fedora and RHEL in my case).

Related issues

Related to Ruby trunk - Bug #4485: Gem.bin_path('rake') does not return the path of the system-installed rake

Since I committed r32608 and r32611 I think this issue is now invalid.

If a different version of rake or rdoc are installed they will behave the same as the bundled library. rake 0.9.2.1 will load the built-in version of rake, for example. If a newer version of RDoc were installed rdoc and ri would behave the same.

When you install Ruby, it carries initial version of /usr/bin/rdoc 1. Now let's assume that you will install updated RDoc, which replaces the file with the typical RubyGems stub, something like:

$ cat /usr/bin/rdoc
#!/usr/bin/ruby
#
# This file was generated by RubyGems.
#
# The application 'rdoc' is installed as part of a gem, and
# this file is here to facilitate running it.
#
require 'rubygems'
version = ">= 0"
if ARGV.first
str = ARGV.first
str = str.dup.force_encoding("BINARY") if str.respond_to? :force_encoding
if str =~ /\A_(.*)_\z/
version = $1
ARGV.shift
end
end
gem 'rdoc', version
load Gem.bin_path('rdoc', 'rdoc', version)

Now, this is problem for packaging systems, namely RPM (but I would be surprised if that is not issue for DEB as well). If you will do monolithic Ruby package, which provides /usr/bin/rdoc and later you want to package independent updated version of RDoc gem, which provides /usr/bin/rdoc as well, you are in conflict, since the files are different. If they would be the same (and there is no reason to be different IMO), there would be no conflict. The file would be own by two packages in parallel, which is supported scenario.

So what I'd like to see is the RubyGems stub in /usr/bin, especially after you committed r32608.

Actually, I'm trying to put together some proposal to solve #5481 and #6124, which might fix also this issue.

No, this is still not resolved (testing with r61169). Only Rake (which is "bundled" gem) appears to have RubyGems generated stub which won't conflict unless RubyGems change the algorithm. The remaining executables (namely bundle, bundler, rdoc) are conflicting.